UCSD scholar wins new $3 million prize

Napoleone Ferrara, senior deputy director for basic sciences at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center, has been chosen as one of the recipients of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a newly created award, and the richest honor of its kind in the history of scientific research.
— Howard Lipin

Napoleone Ferrara, senior deputy director for basic sciences at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center, has been chosen as one of the recipients of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, a newly created award, and the richest honor of its kind in the history of scientific research.
— Howard Lipin

Ferrara ended up in La Jolla because of an off-hand remark he made during a science conference in Snowbird, Utah in January 2012. He casually told UCSD cancer researcher David Cheresh over lunch that he’d grown restless at Genentech and was considering moving on.

It was a big gulp moment. Ferrara was among the most sought-after cancer scientists in the country. He’d soon be courted by Harvard and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. It would be a coup for whoever landed him.

“I said to him real tentatively, ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just get your (resume),” Cheresh recalled on Wednesday. “I sent it to David Brenner [Dean of the UCSD School of Medicine] and we sat down and said, ‘We might as well try and get him.’ “

Such recruitments are notoriously difficult. But the opportunity came up at the very moment that UCSD also was recruiting Lippman from MD Anderson to be the new director of Moores. Lippman realized that grabbing Ferrara could greatly help him improve UCSD, so he pressed the university to come up with incentives to steal him from Genentech. Many of UCSD’s most distinguished professors let Ferrara known that they really, really wanted him.

“It was a full-court press,” Lippman said. And a pricey one. UCSD put together a $10 million recruitment offer that would enable him to develop his own research lab and hire other principal investigators. The focus was on Ferrara’s love -- translational medicine.

“I took it because La Jolla is a good place to be,” Ferrara said. “There are so many good people at UCSD and the campus has strong relations with places like the Salk and Sanford-Burnham.”

The move is the latest turn in a long journey for Ferrera. He grew up in Catania, Italy, where his father worked as a judge. His grandfather taught science, which Ferrara found much more interesting.

“I was really fascinated by medical school and was prepared to become a physician,” Ferrara said. “I had a professor who had worked at UC San Francisco, and he guided me into research. I ended up getting a research fellowship at UCSF. I was very fortunate to do so. If that had not happened, I might have not ended doing this.”

But he adds, “Going to industry from academia 25 years ago, it was like going to the ‘dark side’. It was seen as impure, so there was definitely a stigma there.”

He went on to join Genentech, where he thrived. But UCSD later came up with the right offer at the right time.

His life will be made more comfortable by the money put up Zuckerberg and the other online gurus. He’s thankful, but says, “I have to confess, I am not a big user of social media -- although I do see where it has big value.”

Ferrara says winning the prize with such other eminent scientists as Eric Lander is equally as important. It gives him a pulpit from which to preach the joys of science.

“I would tell kids to always follow your passion, which is what you enjoy doing every day.,” Ferrera said. “Many of my relatives were telling me that medicine was a more respectable profession. They said to me, ‘Oh, what will you do with research?’ But I didn’t let that sway me. In fact, I didn’t listen.”